Writing the DCI Jack Callum Mysteries
The inspiration behind the series.
Len Maynard
1) Three Monkeys
‘The Last Train to San Fernando
barrelled down the stairs carried on Johnny Duncan’s nasal whine. Jack Callum
sighed, laid down his newspaper, and went out into the hall.’
Those were the first lines of a Jack
Callum novel ever to find their way onto my computer in the summer of 2010.
Not a particularly gripping start to a
crime novel I’ll grant you, but for me, they were vitally significant because
those twenty-six words had fixed so much in my head.
Firstly, period. I was now viewing
Britain in the late 1950’s. Secondly, I knew that music, especially skiffle and
early British rock n’ roll would be playing a large part in the coming
narrative. I wasn’t aware then that Jack’s son, Eric, would buy a guitar and
form his own skiffle band, or that his sister would be roped in to sing for
them. That would become a voyage of discovery, as would the whole dynamics of
Jack’s family.
At that moment all I was really
concerned with was the crime Jack would be called on to solve.
I was building a character who had no
apparent flaws, who had a settled home life, a loving, devoted wife and not
much to disturb his uneventful and possibly slightly dull life. I was entering
dangerous territory if I wanted to write an edgy crime novel and not a cosy drawing
room mystery.
One thing I was certain of was that the
crime had to be extreme and deeply disturbing. It had to shake Jack, and the
reader, out of their comfort zone.
If you’ve read Three Monkeys you will be
the judge as to whether I succeeded.
To further complicate Jack’s life I had
the return of his and Annie’s estranged daughter Joanie ready to splinter their
cosy world.
Joan Callum arrived in my mind in the
early hours of a Sunday morning. She arrived fully formed, feisty and
remorseful, and an absolute delight to write.
I had already fallen slightly in love
with Annie. She was the wife I’d always wanted. Level-headed, attractive, and
able to hold her own when dealing with Jack’s dogged nature. But suddenly
Joanie arrived and I was instantly smitten. Here was a young woman who had made
her own decisions (not always the most sensible ones) at a very early age and
was wasting no time in forging forward with her life.
I was starting to engage with the entire
Callum family. Eric was starting to resemble a fourteen version of me, with his
love of music and his desire to play guitar. Rosie was still very much an
innocent teenager. Little did I know then what lay in store for her in the
months ahead.
Three Monkeys was written pretty much on
the fly. I’ve never been much for planning my novels. When I have done this in
the past the results have never been satisfactory. I like to discover what will
happen in the novel the way a reader would.
However, once I decided there would be
more than just one Jack Callum book, I had to break with tradition and started
making notes about the characters and the villains…but not the plot. That
evolved pretty much as it appears in the book. And it was a system I used
throughout the entire series. I hope it’s worked, but you’d be in a much better
position to judge than me.
2)
A Dangerous Life
My fascination for the dark underbelly
of the entertainment business has been evident since I first started writing
back in the 1970’s.
At a funfair, I was always more
interested by what was happening behind the flashing lights than the rides and
sideshows. At the theatre, I always wanted to know what was happening behind the
proscenium arch once the curtain fell.
The character of Tony Turner had a
certain appeal for me – a famous and popular actor whose career was on the
slide. It was someone whose life I wanted to explore, to dig down and uncover
the secrets he had kept hidden behind the showbiz smile. The fact that he was
also my first murder victim gave Jack a good reason to conduct that exploration
on my behalf.
A Dangerous Life also took me away from
the middle-class monster of Three Monkeys and allowed me to write about British
gangland of the 1950’s, a world I only knew about from watching the black and
white B movies at my local cinema.
Growing up, the names of two Edgars –
Lustgarten and Wallace – had been my passport to a monochrome world of murder,
thievery, blackmail, fraud, and all things criminal.
Once I had my background, my characters
and my initial murder the rest came fairly easily.
I wrote the opening scene of a
thirteen-year-old Gerry Turner confessing to the killing of her brother some
months before starting the actual book. It was such a haunting scene that I
knew I would have to use it. I was unaware when I wrote it that it would be a springboard
into another novel.
Equally, I was unaware of how important
young Gerry would become and the role she would go on to play in future Jack
Callum books. But that in itself has been one of the delights in writing about
the Callum world, how minor characters suddenly come into their own and take
centre stage.
Norton Common, where Tony Turner’s
tortured body was found nailed to a tree, like a lot of places depicted in the
books, really exists. It’s a charming and rather lovely area of parkland barely
a mile away from where I live, an ideal spot for ramblers and dog-walkers and
not a place where a dead body is likely to be found. (Sidebar – a few weeks
after finishing A Dangerous Life, a body was found on Norton Common, hanging
from a tree. Nothing to do with me, guv. Honest.)
3)
Appetite For Evil
The genesis for this story dates back to 1958, the year my
father died at the age of thirty-three. I was just five years old.
For the few years that preceded his death he became involved
with the everyday running of St Joseph’s, a local Catholic orphanage. A convert
to that faith in his late twenties, his desire to help out in any way he could
led to him forming a group of volunteers to help with social events, running
sports days and organising film shows for the children and staff.
The first part of Appetite for Evil is pretty much an accurate
account of my early childhood. My portrait of characters like Sister Rosalie,
Cannon Flood, and especially Les Parsons are drawn from life – especially Les’s
glass eye. Les, like my dad, had lost his real eye in an accident at work.
Beyond that, once the murders start, it’s all down to my own
dark imagination.
The memories of the few years I was a
visitor to St Joseph’s, accompanying my dad, are vividly etched on my memory,
but this the first time I have used it in the fabric of a story. Writing the
book was an emotional roller coaster, re-visiting memories that had been long
forgotten, or so I thought.
Once I tapped into them, the names and
faces came back in Dolby surround sound and glorious Technicolor.
Again, and probably because I was, for
the most part, treading familiar ground, the execution of the book was
relatively simple and, once I had put my emotions back in the box labelled Do
Not Disturb, an enjoyable experience.
4)
Deadly Ambitions
Larry Parnes was one of the most successful impresarios and
entrepreneurs of the late ’Fifties, early ’Sixties.
I had read a great deal about him and his ‘stable’ of stars.
Indeed, artistes like Joe Brown, Marty Wilde Billy Fury, and Vince Eager had
provided me with the soundtrack to my early life. Pre-dating the Beatles and
possessed of a glamour and star power that has really been unequalled since Larry Parnes’ stable of good-looking and talented (some more than others) young
men fuelled teenage fantasies and took the record industry to new heights.
My elder sister was a fully paid-up member of the dream world
Parnes was peddling and I absorbed it all through some kind of cultural
osmosis…and by reading her weekly Valentine comic when she had finished
with it.
So, a great deal of the research for Deadly Ambitions had been
done decades before.
The title of the book was an accurate description of the plot.
Harry Franks was a would-be Larry Parnes, but a man with a
fraction of Parnes’ talent or work ethic. He was a get rich quick
merchant who saw the people he was managing as commodities and little else, and
it was this avaricious side to his (frankly, unpleasant) nature that led to his
murder.
Deadly Ambitions was another of the books that put the seedy
side of show business under the microscope, busily lifting stones and examining
the furtive, scurrying things that live beneath them.
Saying that, it was great fun to write and introduced one of my
favourite characters.
Bunny Starling made such an impact on me that I was reluctant to
kill her off when it was time for her to die.
Some of my characters are so unpleasant that I have no qualms in
hastening them towards their demise – Harry Franks for one – but I was
genuinely sad to say goodbye to Bunny. She enlivens the pages in which she
appears and never fails to make me smile.
The climax of the story takes place at
Farringdon Underground station. A station I know intimately after spending over
forty years of my life travelling to and from there when I was working in
Clerkenwell. It was inevitable that it would, one day, feature in one of my
books.
Since finishing Deadly Ambitions I have
returned to Farringdon and, in my mind’s eye, I can picture the scene exactly
as I wrote it. Luckily fellow passengers on the Metropolitan line have no
insight into my thoughts.
I think they’d be horrified.
5) Sins of the Fathers
Sins of the Fathers was the most
difficult of the Jack Callums to write and took longer than the rest of the
books by several months. And this had nothing to do with subject matter or lack
of inspiration. In fact, it was nothing more than real life intruding into my
literary world and making itself so noticeable that I just couldn’t ignore it
and carry on.
I was 20,000 words into Sins and rolling
along like a turbocharged Hillman Hunter when my landlord and owner of the
cottage where I’d spent the best part of the decade, returned from his sojourn
abroad in need of a place to live.
So, effectively, I was out on my ear and
needed to find somewhere else to live and write.
The search for rented accommodation in
Letchworth at that time of year (Christmas) was long and arduous. There was
little on the market that was remotely suitable and the prospect of finding a
three-bedroom cottage similar to the one I was vacating was very slim indeed.
I finally found a two-bedroom apartment
and moved in, sacrificing many of my goods and chattels, including many books
and much of my music, including twelve electric guitars and basses that had
once adorned my walls, and now had nowhere to call home.
I really had no idea how traumatic the
move had been, what a shock to my system it was, until I sat down at my
makeshift desk and attempted to resume Sins of the Fathers from where I had
left it all those months before. And I had nothing. I had left my muse at my
old house and she hadn’t accompanied me to my new home.
Eventually, after a lot of cajoling she
returned, but somewhere along the line she had lost her magic and, not for the
first time in my writing career, I was floundering.
I had no choice but to start from
scratch. I effectively ripped up the twenty thousand words I’d written and
started again with a blank screen.
I’ve stated elsewhere that I’m not a
great or fastidious note-taker but, at that time, I was actively cursing my own
ineptitude and negligence. The words were a long time coming and sometimes it
was like pulling teeth.
Gradually I realised it was nothing
whatsoever to do with a powerless muse or a lack of imaginative power. I was
simply a fish out of water, floundering, and gasping for air.
I had written a good dozen novels at my
old cottage and had become accustomed to the place, to my writing room and the
creature comforts I had fastidiously built up around me. If I was going to make
the new book a success, I would have to repair the damage to my psyche and
rebuild my life.
The solution, when it came, was so
simple. Stop writing.
So, I made the conscious decision to
stop – for about six months. Six months watching DVD box sets, socialising,
catching up on music that I had missed, and just enjoying myself.
After six months my muse returned, with
her tail firmly between her legs, and I completed Sins, followed very quickly
by Into the Fire that took a fraction of the time.
Now I’m back to writing and the cottage
seems like a lifetime ago. Phew! It was touch and go for a moment there.
6) Into The Fire
In my head I sub-titled this, The Death
of a Ring Rat because that was what it was about.
The reason I called it Into the Fire was
simply that I didn’t think the majority of my readers would have any idea what
a ring rat was.
I had just read a series of biographies
of professional wrestlers stretching back to the late ’fifties. It's hard to
believe that televised pro wrestling, in the 1950’s and 60’s had such a
following, but viewing figures of over ten million were commonplace, and people
like Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo were household names. This pre-dated the Big
Daddy and Giant Haystacks period of wrestling which was little more than a
televised pantomime, and much the worse for it.
And it was this golden age that I had a
hankering to write about since I first started writing.
Writing the Jack Callum series finally
gave me the opportunity.
Ring rats were, and still are, the derogatory term given to the women wrestling fans who follow their favourites
from town to town, and sometimes, country to country, in the same way that
groupies follow rock bands.
Once I had decided on a background on
which to paint the scenario, the rest came so easily the book nearly wrote
itself. In fact, the whole thing took me about six weeks from start to finish, a
new record for me, and it produced the book, which is probably my favourite of
the six instalments.
I was even bold enough to include my
love of period Variety theatre as a secondary background. I was doubly blessed.
Also, using the scourge of drug misuse
gave the novel a resonance and relevance to today’s society. Again, it’s easy
to forget that back in 1960 that drug abuse was commonplace and a serious
source of income for the criminal fraternity. So, the research went deep, and
the more I discovered the more I wanted to write the book.
So, that’s it for this look behind the
scenes. I’ve said before that I think of the Jack Callum series as one long
novel, and Into the Fire brought the piece to a satisfying conclusion…for now.
Writing
the DCI Jack Callum Mystery series has been a hell of a ride, and I’m not sure
I’m ready to get off just yet.
A
girl’s body is found in Hertfordshire.
Her
eyes and mouth have been sewn shut. Candle wax has been poured into her ears to
seal them.
DCI
Jack Callum, policeman and dedicated family man, who cut his teeth walking the
beat on the violent streets of London, before moving his family away from the
city, to a safer, more restful life in the country, leads the investigation
into this gruesome crime that shatters the peace of the sleepy English town.
Images
of three monkeys are sent to the police to taunt them: see no evil, hear no
evil, speak no evil. Something more sinister than a mere isolated murder seems
to be going on as more victims come to light.
Who
is doing this and why?
At
the insistence of the first victim’s father, a local dignitary, officers from
Scotland Yard are brought in to bring about a speedy conclusion to the case,
side-lining Jack’s own investigation.
In
a nail-biting climax, one of Jack’s daughters is snatched. Before she can
become the next victim, Jack has to go against the orders of his superiors that
have constantly hampered his investigation, and risk his own career in an
attempted rescue at the killer’s own home.
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Len Maynard
Len
Maynard was born in North London in 1953.
In
1978, a book of short ghost stories, written in collaboration with Michael
Sims, was published by London publisher William Kimber. For the following forty
years the pair wrote ten more collections of ghost stories before moving into
novels in 2006, completing over thirty more books, including the successful
Department 18 series of supernatural/crime crossover novels as well as several
standalone novels and novellas in the supernatural and crime genres.
Always
a keen reader of crime novels, and with a passion for the social history of the
twentieth-century it was fairly inevitable that, when he decided to branch out
and write under his own name, some kind of combination of these two interests
would occur.
The
six DCI Jack Callum Mysteries were the result of several years of total
immersion in the world he created for Jack Callum, his family, his friends (and
enemies) and his work colleagues.
He
has also written a trilogy of adventure thrillers set in the Bahamas (also
available from Sharpe Books).
He
is currently at work on the seventh book in the DCI Jack Callum series.
Connect
with Len:
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Mysteries” • Twitter • Instagram • Facebook
